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Childhood   Listen
noun
Childhood  n.  
1.
The state of being a child; the time in which persons are children; the condition or time from infancy to puberty. "I have walked before you from my childhood."
2.
Children, taken collectively. (R.) "The well-governed childhood of this realm."
3.
The commencement; the first period. "The childhood of our joy."
Second childhood, the state of being feeble and incapable from old age.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Childhood" Quotes from Famous Books



... one presence, one gracious personality. A scarlet blister on a round white arm, the quiver of a girl's lip a-tremble on the verge of tears—these and no longing for home, these and no memory of father or mother or the days of childhood, filled his heart to overflowing. He dreamed with his eyes on the hills, but it ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... praise; and the blame it once has, it has always; for almost from my infancy it has ever been one: the same inclination, the same turn, the same force; and as to universal opinions, I fixed myself from my childhood in the place where I resolved to stick. There are some sins that are impetuous, prompt, and sudden; let us set them aside: but in these other sins so often repeated, deliberated, and contrived, whether sins of complexion or sins of profession ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... fat or thin?—is he like you or M. d'Arblay? etc.—with sweet vivacity of interest,- -the lovely Princess Amelia finishing her listening to my every answer with a "dear little thing!" that made me long to embrace her as I have done in her childhood. She is now full as tall as princess royal, and as much formed ; she looks seventeen, though only fourteen, but has an innocence, an Hebe blush, an air of modest candour, and a gentleness so caressingly inviting, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... of toil in a rigorous climate they left their sons little besides a stumpy farm and a coon-skin overcoat. Far from the centres of life their amusements, their humours, their religion, their folk lore, their views of things had in them the flavour of the timber lands, the simplicity of childhood. Every son was nurtured in the love of honour and of industry, and the hope of sometime being president. It is to be feared this latter thing and the love of right living, for its own sake, were ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller

... Suwalki, Russia, in 1863, came to England in childhood). Rabbi and jurist; educated at Jews' College and University College of London; for thirteen years Senior Dayan of the London Beth-Din (Jewish Court of Arbitration), in which capacity, because of his erudition in both the Jewish and the common law, he rendered ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... to be more nutritious. Propagated by centuries of isolated homesteaders, heirlooms that survived did so because these superior varieties helped the gardeners' better-nourished babies pass through the gauntlet of childhood illnesses. ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon

... gets a little too much of herself, and an overdose in this direction is about as bad as most insufferable things. But then there must be seasons of discouragement in everything. They inhere to all human enterprises, just as measles and whooping-cough to childhood. It is well to remember as they pass how rarely it is that they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... You see, I have a restless nature, for some reason, while all the rest of my race are quiet and contented Orks and seldom stray far from home. From childhood days I loved to fly long distances away, although father often warned me that I would get into trouble ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I could mark and fix every locality, every detail. Naturally, I was a good deal moved. I said, 'Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of my childhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other place.' The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again—convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... of his wife, and under some trifling obligations to him in obtaining for him his present command. He certainly had spoken to the prime minister, and he thought it not impossible, considering the intimate terms which the minister and he had been on from childhood, that his solicitation might have had some effect; at all events, it was pleasant to find that there was some little gratitude left in this world. After this, of course, every officer went, with the exception of the master, ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat

... them on all sides, and then I saw the track of a wolf, and that minded me, as that track in snow ever must, of Owen and the day when he came to my help at Eastdean. That is the clearest memory I have of my childhood. ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler

... was past his childhood, he went once to a grammar-school, and asked the master for one of Homer's books; and he making answer that he had nothing of Homer's, Alcibiades gave him a blow with his fist, and went away. Another schoolmaster telling him that he had Homer corrected by ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... Her childhood had been a strange one. There had been no near relatives to interest themselves in the motherless girl left to the tender mercies of a brother nearly twenty years her senior, who was frankly and undisguisedly ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... friend was privileged beyond many in the pious care exercised in her religious training. She became early acquainted with the teachings of divine grace, and from childhood, appears highly to have valued the holy scriptures. It was frequently her practice to set apart some portion of the day for private retirement and meditation, and in thus seeking to wait upon the Lord for the renewal of her spiritual strength, she ...
— The Annual Monitor for 1851 • Anonymous

... besides the knowledge of his good (or foolish) disposition when a boy, had now discovered several sparks of goodness, friendship, and generosity in his friend, began to discourse over the accidents which had happened in their childhood, and took frequent occasions of reminding him of those favours which we have before mentioned his having conferred on him; he then proceeded to the most vehement professions of friendship, and to the most ardent expressions of joy in this renewal of their acquaintance. He at last told him, with ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding

... one autumn by his son Salve, a black-haired, dark-eyed, handsome lad, with a sharp, clever face, who had worked in the fishing-boats along the coast from his childhood almost, and had, in fact, been brought up amongst its sunken rocks and reefs and breakers. He was something small in stature, perhaps; but what he wanted in robustness he made up in readiness and activity—qualities which stood him in good stead in the ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie

... was found smoking a cigar, and talking very earnestly with Mr. Errol about presentiments, and sudden remembrances of childhood's days. He dropped the conversation at once when business was mentioned, and, in a few minutes, the Squire's official room contained five men, with very serious faces, seeking to come to a full understanding of what seemed a diabolical plot on the part of some spiteful malefactors. ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... upon their last encounter. The great free-trader, while a boy, had shown an especial aptitude for chess, and even as a child he had seemed to know the men when first, by some accident, he saw them. The rector being struck by this exception to the ways of childhood—whose manner it is to take chess-men for "dollies," or roll them about like nine-pins—at once included in the education of "Izunsabe," which he took upon himself, a course of elemental doctrine in the one true ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... horses, and removing all signs of weather and battle. Ronald felt a thrill of pleasure at hearing his native language spoken. He had now so far improved the knowledge of French as to be able to converse without difficulty, for Malcolm had from his childhood tried to keep up his French, and had lately always spoken in that language to him, unless it was necessary to speak in English in order to ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty

... supported the family and at the same time enriched the lives of a large part of young America, starting off many little minds with wholesome thoughts and many little hearts with wholesome emotions. She leaves memory-word-pictures of healthy, New England childhood days,—pictures which are turned to with affection by middle-aged children,—pictures, that bear a sentiment, a leaven, that middle-aged America needs nowadays more than we care ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... pass that the child was named John. The name was expanded to Johnny during the first period of childhood. Afterwards it was contracted to Jack, and did not attain to the simple grandeur of John till the owner of ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... experience that teaches proportion. The eye of childhood is wonderfully misled in that matter. Promise a little child the moon, and show him the ladder to be used, he sees nothing inadequate in the means; so Grace Hope was delighted ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade

... in loving Adrian: although she not having yet escaped from childhood could not appreciate as I did the extent of his merits, or feel the same sympathy in his pursuits and opinions. I was for ever with him. There was a sensibility and sweetness in his disposition, that gave ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... your vicinity, Mr. Vane, I have given myself the pleasure of calling," he said, in a peculiar but not disagreeable voice. "Your honoured grandfather treated me—I may say it without presumption—as a friend, having known me from childhood ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald

... perhaps, my dear reader, reached at length some spot where all was well with thee; where the love for home and its calm peace, innate to all, has again sprung up within thee; where thou hast thought that this home was rich with all the flowers of childhood and of the purest, deepest love that rests upon the graves of those that are gone, and thou hast felt it must be good to dwell here and to build habitations. Even if thou hast erred in this, and hast had afterward ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque

... the man who was so carried away with her that he carried her away. My course is best, therefore, on general principles, while in this particular instance we have every reason for prompt action. Lou and I have been destined for each other from childhood, and I'm not willing to leave her to the chances of the hurly-burly which may soon begin. As my wife I can protect her in ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe

... a lot of things that I did not understand. He said that when one grew out of childhood, he lost his sympathy with events, and when that sympathy was lost, it was possible to live in the world only as an adventurer ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post

... be considered ungrammatical. The following examples, and perhaps also some of the foregoing, are susceptible of improvement: "Youth is the time, when we are young."—Sanborn's Gram., p. 120. Say rather, "Youth is that part of life which succeeds to childhood." "The boy gave a satisfactory reason why he was tardy."—Ibid. Say rather, "The boy gave a satisfactory reason for his tardiness." "The several sources from whence these pleasures are derived."—Murray's Key, p. 258. Say rather—"sources from which" "In cases where it is only ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... close to one of those senseless hands, to her it was a matter of a breaking heart, of eyes which could be no longer urged to tears, the wells having dried up. Dear God, she thought, how cruel it was! Her tried and trusted friend, the one playmate of her childhood, was silently slipping out of her life forever. Ah, what to her were crowns and kingdoms, aye, and even war? Her father dead, what mattered it who reigned? How she prayed that he might live! They would go away together, and live in peace and quiet, undisturbed by the storms of intrigue.... ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... have gone to him and said, "Look here; Rogers is a friend of mine, and known to me from childhood. There's honesty in him, but 'tis like streaks in bacon; and for some reason or another he chooses that all his dealin's with me shall keep to the honest streak. If you ask me how I know this, 'twouldn't be easy to answer: I do know it, and I trust ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... only had suffered, they might have laid down their lives cheerfully, as they would have done the stake of any other lost game; and as for the priests, it was their privilege to be martyrs. But think of those fair matrons, and gentle girls, and delicate mignonnes, that had been petted from their childhood, cooped up in the foul courts of the Abbaye and La Force, with even the necessaries of life begrudged them, till the light died in their eyes and the gloss faded from their tresses; and then brought out to die in the chill, misty Brumaire morning, howled at and derided ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence

... be too great trouble to tell you about the spies and their master, and about the guards and laws and ceremonies, both within and without the State, which you can of yourself imagine. Since from childhood they are chosen according to their inclination and the star under which they were born, therefore each one working according to his natural propensity does his duty well and pleasantly, because naturally. The same things I may say concerning ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells

... and still is, my ruling passion, the joy of my heart, the very sunshine of my existence. In childhood, in boyhood, and in man's estate, I have been a rover; not a mere rambler among the woody glens and upon the hilltops of my own native land, but an enthusiastic rover throughout the length and breadth of the wide, ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne

... occupied all its faculties, was the hope of satisfaction, or vengeance, if you will, for so many ages of guilty tyranny. The tears, the burning and blood of nearly one thousand years seemed to letter the eastern sky, as day dawned upon my way. Apprehension, I had none. From earliest childhood to that hour, I never met one Irishman whose hope of hope it was not to deliver the country forever from English thrall. I had lived amidst all ranks (at least in their characters of politicians), had known the sentiments of all, from the most ignorant peasant ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny

... All through Havelock's childhood the continent of Europe was under the foot of Napoleon, and was forced to submit to his rule. England only had stood aloof and refused his advances; yet she waited, with the dread that accompanies the expectation whose fulfilment is delayed, for an invasion of her ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang

... referred to my passionate love of history even in my early childhood. This passion has constantly developed. The more I have travelled, the more clearly I have perceived that one cannot know a people unless one knows thoroughly its antecedents; that is, if one be not fully acquainted with its annals ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... verse architect that not a line of true poetry was ever written by mortal man; that even the song of Solomon and the odes of Anacreon are but as the jingling of sweet bells out of tone, a dissonance in the divine harmony; that you can no more write poetry than you can paint the music of childhood's laughter, or hear the dew-beaded jasmine bud breathing its sensuous perfume to the morning sun. The true poets are those whose hearts are harps of a thousand strings, ever swept by unseen hands—those whose lips are mute because ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... tiny remote corner of his mind, as tiny as the smallest toy he had ever seen in his childhood, he was still aware of the room and the ship, and of Father Moontree picking up a telephone and speaking to a Scanner captain in charge of ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith

... he went on, up and up, cautiously, clear of head as one who had from childhood played about the cliffs, and reaching the summit breathless, to stand on the extreme verge, watching one of the ravens, which came sailing up, saw him at a distance, rose above his head, and then began to circle ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn

... military career long before, as Froissart mentions him as knighted on the occasion of the battle fought a few days after the surrender of that place, between Sir Archibald Douglas and Sir Thomas Musgrave; none but kings' sons were knighted in childhood in those days, or without undergoing a long previous probation in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various

... full external stimulus for a poet's eye and heart. His father, John Shakspere, who was a general dealer in agricultural products and other commodities, was one of the chief citizens of the village, and during his son's childhood was chosen an alderman and shortly after mayor, as we should call it. But by 1577 his prosperity declined, apparently through his own shiftlessness, and for many years he was harassed with legal difficulties. In the village ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... of National Biography. But the two Hakes who were thrown across Borrow most intimately were Thomas Hake and George Hake, the latter of whom lately died in Africa. Thomas Hake, the eldest of the family, knew Borrow in his own childhood, which the other members of the family did not. After Dr. Gordon Hake went to live in Germany, after the Roehampton home was broken up, I saw a good deal of Borrow. He always thought that no one sympathised with him and understood ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... of Antioch, and remarkable from his childhood for the beauty of his person and his sparkling wit, to which he owed his freedom. His talent soon raised him to eminence as an improvisatore and dramatic declaimer. He trusted mostly to extempore inspiration when acting his Mimes, but wrote certain episodes where it was ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... interest lies in Mary Olivier's search for Reality, her relations with her mother, father and three brothers, and her final passage from the bondage of infancy, the conflicts of childhood and adolescence, the disenchantments (and other drawbacks) of maturity, to the freedom, peace and ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford

... that Australia which our fathers thought of chiefly as a kind of far-off rubbish-heap where they could fling out the human garbage of England, to rot or redeem itself as it might, well out of the way of society's fastidious nostril, and which to our childhood was chiefly associated with the wild gold-fever and the wreck and ruin which that fever too often wrought. The transportation system, so far as Australia was concerned, came virtually to an end with the discovery of gold ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling

... characters. A born aristocrat, he at no time took the trouble to pose as a special friend of the people; a born leader, he led with a rough unsparing hand. He was the soul of controversy. To one who knew him from his childhood as I did, always loving him and rarely agreeing with him, it was plain to see how his most obvious faults commended him to the multitude and made for a popularity that never quite ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... is sure, plain food made strong men and women of most of them; and no lingering dyspepsia of childhood spoiled the pleasure of those of them who won their way to the right to live as they ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson

... suspicion of the police which sometimes affects otherwise clear-headed people. You pick out men whose character is without flaw from their childhood upwards. You put them into a blue uniform, and lo! their whole personality alters. They are hypocrites and bullies, bribed by bookmakers and prostitutes, and capable ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot

... in the United States. No other character in all her repertory made such a swift appeal to Miss Adams as Peter Pan. She saw in him the idealization of everything that was wonderful and wistful in childhood. ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... excellent friends. Two or three of them returned to the wood, and brought me cocoa-nuts and bananas. But we must be careful to hide our guns, of which they have a holy horror. And now, dear father, I think we ought not to call these people savages. They have the simplicity of childhood; a trifle irritates them, a trifle appeases them; they are grateful and affectionate. I find them neither cruel nor barbarous. They have done me no harm, when they might easily have killed me, thrown me into the sea, or ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss

... back, come back together, All ye fancies of the past, Ye days of April weather, Ye shadows that are cast By the haunted hours before! Come back, come back, my childhood; Thou art summoned by a spell From the green leaves of the wildwood, From beside the charmed well, For Red Riding-Hood, the darling, The flower ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... by Poe, "I have resided there all my life until within the last few years," suggests but slight cause for his love of Richmond, the home of his childhood, the darkening clouds of which, viewed through the softening lens of years, may have shaded off to brighter tints, as the roughness of a landscape disappears and melts into mystic, dreamy beauty as we journey far ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... words are separated from things, we are apt to lose sight of the importance of the difference of names in an early age of the world. The modern investigations however of comparative mythology enable us to realize the fact, that in the childhood of the world words implied real differences in things; not merely in our conceptions, but in the thing conceived.(792) But the explanations above offered will show that, independently of the general law of mind just noticed, a really ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... twenty journies in. And how this should be such a traveling moving state, as that it should hinder their keeping this ordinance in its season, to wit, to circumcise their children the eighth day; especially considering to circumcise them in their childhood, as they were born, might be with more security, than to let them live while they were men, I ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... the House had come from any more than he knew now where it had gone. It was a gift out of his childhood to his shy, unfriended youth, but he understood that if ever its walls should waver and rise again to enclose his dreams, there would be no Princess. Never any more. Princesses were for fairy tales; girls wanted Things. There ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin

... she had an eunuch who had come with her from the court of her uncle King Suleiman Shah, and he was intelligent, quickwitted, a man of good counsel. So she took him apart one day and said to him, 'Thou hast been my servant from my childhood to this day; canst thou not therefore avail to get me news of my son, for that I cannot speak of his matter?' 'O my lady,' answered he, 'this is an affair that thou hast concealed from the first, and were thy son here, it would not be possible for thee to harbour him, lest thine ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... whilst he was living with them, and at the same time whilst he was doing them every possible good, and cursing them after his return to England; not that he could give any reason why, but because it had become a habit with him since his childhood, and he had been accustomed to hear his father and grandfather do so before him, and I suppose he liked to keep up that which no doubt he thought a good ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve

... remember that auction! Looking back "through the dim posterns of the mind" into the far-off days of my childhood, I see, among other things, the large and comfortable mansion—it was the home of plenty and the temple of hospitality—in which I passed some of the goldenest hours of my boyhood. But the finest play has an end, and the sweetest feasts and the merriest pastimes do not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... awake when I saw your picture, which evermore transfigured itself into a cheerful diffused purity. Serious and yet charming, quite you and yet no longer you, the divine form irradiated by a wonderful light! Now it was like the terrible gleam of visible omnipotence, now like a soft ray of golden childhood. With long, still drafts my spirit drank from the cool spring of pure passion and became secretly intoxicated with it. And in this blissful drunkenness I felt a spiritual worthiness of a peculiar kind, because every earthly sentiment was entirely strange to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... too," exclaimed Benjamin, who had sat listening quietly whilst the letter was being read. On the faces of several of the elder people there was a far-away look and sometimes a smile, for the scenes described in the letter brought back memories of their own childhood when the holidays and the preparations for them were similar to those ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager

... genius was smouldering since his childhood; it was there from the beginning; and the proof of it lies in the fact that he used for his Ouverture des Francs-Juges and for the Symphonie fantastique airs and phrases of quintets which he had written when twelve years ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... retired parish, among the companions of his childhood, he was called to Torrington, Connecticut, where he continued preaching two years to large audiences.[10] It is said that at Torrington a leading citizen was much displeased that the church should have "a nigger minister," and, to show his disrespect, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various

... childhood to observe all kinds of manifestations, was a marvelous reader of the minds of men, and, merely because Mynheer Jacobus Huysman interrupted a conversation to look out into the dark, he knew that he expected something. And whatever it was it was important, ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler

... thoughts unworthy of his position. They reminded him of his own childhood, when he had dreamed of becoming one of the Lesser Gods, or even Zeus himself! Zeus had provided the best answer to those dreams, Forrester knew. "Now I am a man," Zeus had said, "and I put away ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett

... thousands of people who have all their lives long been brought into contact with Christianity. Superficial knowledge is the worst enemy of accurate knowledge, for the first condition of knowing a thing is to know that we do not know it. And so there are a great many of us who, having picked up since childhood vague and partially inaccurate notions about Christ and His Gospel and what He has done, are so satisfied on the strength of these that we know all about it, that we listen to preaching about it with a very languid attention. The ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... with a couple of windows, whereof a tenth part might be of glass, the remainder being stopped up with old copybooks and paper. Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, little faces, which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering. There was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone and its helplessness alone remaining—truly an incipient Hell. A few minutes having elapsed, Squeers called up the ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... to understand them, I will not enter into. Also several authorities, not mission authorities alone, state with ethnologists that the African is incapable of learning, except during the period of childhood. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... Hystaspes, a young Persian of the blood royal, similar in person to Bartja, and scarcely less gorgeously apparelled than he. The third to disembark was an aged man with snow-white hair, in whose face the gentle and kind expression of childhood was united, with the intellect of a man, and the experience of old age. His dress consisted of a long purple robe with sleeves, and the yellow boots worn by the Lydians;—his whole appearance produced an impression of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... good sign in Nat. It is a characteristic of nearly every person who lives to make a mark upon the world. It was true of the three men, to whom we have just referred, Bowditch, Davy, and Buxton. From their childhood they thought for themselves, so that when they became men, they defended their opinions against imposing opposition. True, a youth must not be too forward in advancing his ideas, especially if they do not harmonize with those of older persons. ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer

... emphasis lay—in the matter of luxury for his only son, Peter, Pupkin senior was a Maritime Province man right to the core, with all the hardihood of the United Empire Loyalists ingrained in him. No luxury for that boy! No, sir! From his childhood, Pupkin senior had undertaken, at the least sign of luxury, to "tan it out of him," after the fashion still in vogue in the provinces. Then he sent him to an old-fashioned school to get it "thumped out of him," and after that he had put ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock

... from spring to spring, and from pasture to pasture. Even then he begins his conflict with hunger and thirst; is scorched by a vertical sun; shriveled by the burning sand beneath; and poisoned by the breath of the simoom. Hardened thus through his infancy and childhood, both in body and mind, he becomes, under the exhortations and example of his father, a robber from his youth; attacks every stranger whom he is able to overcome; and plunders every valuable thing on which ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser

... end, the most rancorous political injustice. His early training was no less favorable to this result than his birth. His father removed to Westchester county, and, on a pleasant rural domain still occupied by the family, the future jurist's childhood was passed. At that time there was a French church at New Rochelle, the pastor of which was an excellent scholar; and this gentleman fitted young Jay for college. He gave early proofs of a studious turn of mind and a reticent temperament; acquiring knowledge with pleasure and facility; and, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... whom his mother used always to be talking about, and whose name he had not heard now for so long that he had almost forgotten it. Skeeter Newson—Newt—"The Lewis Woman." He saw it all in a blinding flash, and in that awful moment of realization he passed out of his childhood and entered ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... native minds, cast in the idiomatic forms of the native tongue by those born to its use. No matter how fluent a foreigner becomes in a language not his own, he can never use it as does one who has been familiar with it from childhood. This general maxim is tenfold true when we apply it to a European learning an American language. The flow of thought, as exhibited in these two linguistic families, is in such different directions that no amount of practice ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various

... drawings of her various homes; that of her childhood, as well as of the hearths she ruled and loved. There were a few portraits on the walls also of those whom she ranked as her particular friends. Lord Roehampton was one, another was the Count ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... which way to charge, Fargu thought with terror how it would be when he came to know the temptation of the huddle-spot leopards, and the knife-clawed lynxes, with which the forest was haunted. For the boy had been so steeped in the sun, from childhood so saturated with his influence, that he looked upon every danger from a sovereign height of courage. When, therefore, he was approaching his sixteenth year, Fargu ventured to beg of Watho that she would lay her commands upon the youth himself, and ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald

... lost their mothers on the day of their birth: their fathers were soldiers of fortune; and both killed in one day, in the fame engagement. But their fortunes were not more similar than their persons and dispositions. They were both extremely handsome; and in their Childhood were so remarkable for liveliness of parts, and sweetness of temper, that they were the admiration of the ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding

... to his autobiography, was well satisfied to go, but Francis, aged fifteen, had just been married to one of the Queen's Maids of Honour, aged fourteen, and after four days of revelry was in no mood to be thrust back into the estate of childhood.[338] High words passed between him and his father on the occasion of his enforced departure for Paris. He was so agitated that he mislaid his sword and pistols—at least so we hear by the first letter Marcombes writes from Paris. "Mr Francis att his departure from London was so much troubled ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard

... somewhat vain disposition. The future is nothing; but the past is myself, my own history, the seed of my present thoughts, the mould of my present disposition. It is not in vain that I return to the nothings of my childhood; for every one of them has left some stamp upon me or put some fetter on my boasted free-will. In the past is my present fate; and in the past also is my real life. It is not the past only, but the past that has been many years in that tense. The doings ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Mauperin had had the same disappointment. She was one of those little girls who are women when they are born, and who play with their parents merely to amuse them. She scarcely had any childhood, and at the age of five, if a gentleman called to see her father, she always ran away to wash her hands. She would be kissed on certain spots, and she seemed to dread being ruffled or inconvenienced by a ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... he be a good hunter, and well-beloved, is seldom permitted to keep a wife that a stronger man thinks worth his notice. This custom prevails throughout all the tribes, and causes a great spirit of emulation among their youth, who are upon all occasions, from their childhood, trying their strength and skill in wrestling." With the Guanas of South America, Azara states that the men rarely marry till twenty years old or more, as before that age they ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... to the shock of war. The sky spread above them as over us, and all around them was the green gloom of the forests, the whiteness of lakes and rivers, the rough purple of the heather. The great happenings of life, childhood and age and death, were for them what they are for us, yet their blood flowed warmer than ours. Browned by wind and sun, wet by the rain and the early dew of the morning, they delighted in the vigor of the prime. Their love ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston

... shall never interrupt his father when he is speaking; that, you have just been guilty of. Neither do children judge their parents; that also you have just done. When I was forty years of age my father was in his second childhood; but I do not remember ever having raised my voice above his. This said, I continue. I provided the necessary funds for the expenses of Albert's household completely, distinct from my own, for he had his own servants, horses, and ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau

... pain and trouble of correcting and disciplining them, and this, too, even in cases where the parents themselves are true Christians; and then, when they begin to get unbearable, and have passed out of the winning ways of early childhood, they are too often thrown back upon themselves, and made to suffer the penalty of neglect of discipline and training, which ought properly to be inflicted on the parents, who have not ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson

... glibly repeated from childhood remains practically unmarked till some mature experience enforces it, so did this High-Place Hall now for the first time really show itself to Elizabeth-Jane, though her ears had heard its name ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... near the hair, or on the palms of the hands, soles of the feet, the arms and legs, but is usually sparse on the body. The eruption appears about the same time in smallpox and not in successive crops, as in chickenpox. Chickenpox is more commonly a disease of childhood; smallpox attacks all ages. The crusts in chickenpox are thin, and appear in four or five days, while those of smallpox are large and yellow, and occur ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various

... often had music and recitations at our parties, and that was always a great pleasure to me. I remember so well one evening when we had the chorus of the Conservatoire and they sang quite beautifully the old "Plaisirs d'Amour" of our childhood. It had a great success and they were obliged to repeat it. W. made one great innovation in the dress of the ladies of the Conservatoire chorus. They were always dressed in white, which was very well for the young, slight figures, but was less happy for a stout middle-aged lady. ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington

... It was so still that it seemed as if sound would die in it. Not a mouse stirred. The few pictures on the walls looked perishing with cold and changelessness. The very shine of the old damask was wintry. But Cosmo did not long stand gazing. He crossed to one of the shrines of his childhood's reverence, opened it, and began to examine the things with the eye of a seller. Once they had seemed treasures inestimable, now he feared they might bring him nothing in his sore need. Scarce a sorrow ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... Castle of Coarraze, it will be seen that more marvellous things are told than that Henri Quatre passed much of his childhood there. ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... favoured by birth as few writers have been. He was the son of a worthy nobleman who gave him, from early childhood, a most carefully conducted education. He never tires in praising the good qualities of his father, who had followed Francis I. to his Italian campaigns, and, like that monarch, had conceived a preference for those classical studies which were then again ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... ever since. Her name is Margaret Louise Hodges, but she is called Maggie Lou by every one. She has dark curly hair, and deep brown eyes, and a very silvery voice. I have found out that she lies some, but she says it is because she had such an unhappy childhood, and has promised to overcome it ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... said, "I know marriage is a holy state for those who are truly called to it, and have no other drawing; but from my childhood upwards I have been led towards another path; all my peace and my joy have come from having no life of my own, no wants, no wishes for myself, and living only in God and those of his creatures whose sorrows and joys he has given me to know. Those ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... my childhood and girlhood, our family passed from wealth to poverty. My father and only brother were killed in battle during the Civil War; our slaves were freed; our plantations melted from my mother's white hands during the Reconstruction ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... done more than Lady Gregory to revive the Irish Literature, and to bring again to light the brave old legends, the old heroic poems. From her childhood, the author has studied this ancient language, and has collected most of her material from close association with the peasants who have inherited these ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough

... on the day which followed his introduction to Romayne, Father Benwell sat drinking his coffee in the housekeeper's room—to all appearance as much at his ease as if he had known Miss Notman from the remote days of her childhood. A new contribution to the housekeeper's little library of devotional works lay on the table; and bore silent witness to the means by which he had made those first advances which had won him his ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins

... him, and is still living. His mother having died when he was two and a half years old, he was within the next six months placed in the care of Mr. William Hawkins, a Coles County farmer, with whom he lived about ten years. As to his childhood experiences on the Hawkins' farm nothing is now known. They were probably such as are common to children raised in the country. Of Mr. Hawkins he always spoke kindly, referring to him as "Pa Hawkins." His nature was not suited to farm life, ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... first introduction to the family. On coming back a few days afterwards (for I did not consider my banishment perpetual), I found they had christened him 'Heathcliff': it was the name of a son who died in childhood, and it has served him ever since, both for Christian and surname. Miss Cathy and he were now very thick; but Hindley hated him: and to say the truth I did the same; and we plagued and went on with him shamefully: for I wasn't reasonable enough to feel my injustice, and the mistress never ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte

... greatest want. A descendant of a noble family, and possessing an unpolluted character, Bonaparte fixed upon him as one of the pillars for the reestablishment of the Catholic worship, made him an Archbishop of Paris, and procured him the rank of a Cardinal from Rome. But he is now in his second childhood, entirely directed by his grand vicaries, Malaret, De Mons, and Legeas, who are in the pay of, and absolutely devoted to, Bonaparte. An innocent instrument in their hands, of those impious compliments pronounced by him to the Emperor and the Empress, he did not, perhaps, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... be signally incomplete without some mention of the birth, childhood, early associations, and very peculiar and abnormal psychological experiences of Professor Stowe. Aside from the fact of Dr. Stowe's being Mrs. Stowe's husband, and for this reason entitled to notice in any sketch of her life, however meagre, he is the original of the "visionary ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... head rebelliously upon the pillow and looked up at her. Something in his eyes brought to mind certain stormy crises in the headstrong childhood of the Little Doctor-crises in which she was forced to submission very much against her will. It was the same mutinous surrender to overwhelming strength, the ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower

... workers in Ohio will never be known. Their strength lay in their cooperation. To give their names and their work would fill all the space allowed for this chapter but one exception should in justice be made. Elizabeth J. Hauser from her childhood days until the Federal Amendment was ratified gave her life to woman's enfranchisement. Painstaking, fearless, unselfish and able, she labored cheerfully, not caring for praise or credit for the things she accomplished. A good executive, organizer, legislative worker, speaker ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various

... growing old, I suppose, and trembling on the brink of second childhood, so we must not blame him. But still he is not a very great favorite of mine, and I cannot refrain from echoing the complaint in one of the comic papers—"Why doesn't ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren

... over the singing of the Internationale in the police-station. Had she discovered a "character" in this seemingly insignificant little machinist? At any rate, she plied him with questions about his past life and his ideas. When he told her of his starved and neglected childhood, she murmured sympathetically, and it seemed to the fascinated Jimmie that here was a woman who understood instinctively all the cravings of his soul. She laid her hand on his arm, and it was as if an angel were touching him—strange ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... I look back to my life with him I realize that I was possibly more blessed than I deserved to be permitted to live with such a well-nigh perfect character and to know him familiarly. From my earliest childhood I was accustomed to see the sorrowing and oppressed come to him for advice. He was especially qualified to perform such a function owing to his long tenure of the office of Surrogate. Widows and orphans who could not afford litigation always found ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... then, is the Association's continual mode of progression from its origins until the present moment; it is by conveying from childhood the germ of poison into the highest classes of society, in feeding the minds of students on ideas diametrically opposed to that order of things under which they have to live, in breaking the ties that bind them to sovereigns, that Illuminism has recruited the largest number of adepts, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... you will observe that the order followed in History has a good deal of the natural course of argument and meditation: and that it is not a very foreign idea that these heresies are the loud thinking {121} of a mighty host, as it outgrows its childhood, and ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson

... from childhood, though God pity the poor girl if they ever marry. His work in the Jerseys has been almost as merciless as that of 'Red' Fagin, an' 't is even whispered about they ride together at times. I doubt if she knows the whole truth about him, though ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish

... say the same; but it is contradicted by herself, who ought to know best—(except in taking her turn to herd them into a place of safety on an alarm). If she followed the flocks to the fields, it must have been, she says, in her childhood, and she has no recollection of it. Hers was a more sheltered and safer lot. The girls were brought up by their mother indoors in all the labours of housewifery, but also in the delicate art of needlework, so much more exquisite in those days than now. Perhaps Isabeau, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... terror. To him there was no wrath in the thunder any more than in the greeting of the dog that found him in his kennel. To him there was no being in the sky so righteous as to be more displeased than pitiful over the wrongness of the children whom he had not yet got taught their childhood. Gibbie sat calm, awe-ful, but, I imagine, with a clear forehead and smile-haunted mouth, while the storm roared and beat and flashed and ran about him. It was the very fountain of tempest. From the bare crest of the mountain the water poured ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... impostor. His first instinct had been to protect his sister from an unknown scamp, and he was sorry that he had spoken to her so roughly. Her distress and anxiety were apparent, and he was filled with pity for her. Since childhood they had been the best of pals, and if she loved a man who was worthy of her he would aid the affair in every way possible. He was surprised by the abruptness with which she stepped close to him and laid her hand ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson

... officers of the citadel. With the exception of the night- watch, they were all invited to dine with the commandant. A day of joy and rejoicing to all but the poor prisoner, who sat solitary in his cell, and recalled, with a sad heart, the happy days of his childhood. "The holy evening" had been to him a golden book of promise, and a munificent ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach

... Tabithy was wrong. There is as much growth in the thoughts and feelings that run behind us as in those that run before us. You may make a rich, full picture of your childhood to-day; but let the hour go by, and the darkness stoop to your pillow with its million shapes of the past, and my word for it, you shall have some flash of childhood lighten upon you, that was unknown to your busiest thought of ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell

... is to hear The laugh of childhood ringing clear In woody path or grassy lane Our feet ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley

... intolerable to the unprincipled reader, when a very curious thing arrested the attention both of Moriarty and myself—the strangest coincidence, perhaps, within the personal experience of either of us—a conjuncture, in fact, which for a moment threw us both staggering back on the theology of childhood. At the present time, I feel too meek to attempt any unravelment, and too haughty to offer any apology other ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... grief, what deep melancholy, what ineffaceable regrets we feel, when as age comes on we look back, when we see our friends fallen upon the road one after the other, above all when we visit the beloved scenes of our childhood, those homes of other years, that witnessed our first start in terrestrial existence, our first games, our first affections—those affections of childhood that seemed eternal—when we wander over those fields and ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion

... on again, somewhat unwillingly on my part, for though I thought my apprehensions might be cowardly and ignorant, yet D. was but a child, and had the attractive wilfulness of childhood, and she was, I saw, determined to get back to her husband, and the devotion and affection of the young wife were so pleasant to see, that I had not the heart to offer serious opposition to her wishes, especially as ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... no anxiety, my dear Mrs. Travilla," he said cheerily, taking her hand in his for a moment, in his kind fatherly way—for he was an old man now, and had known her from her early childhood—"the injuries are not at all serious, and there is no reason why your husband should not be about again in a week or so. But how did it happen? What hand ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley

... strange and most uncommon intimacy existed between these young creatures, almost might it have been called a friendship of the spirit. Yet, and this was the curious part of it, they were dissimilar in almost everything that goes to make up a human being. Even in childhood there was scarcely a subject on which they thought alike, scarcely a point upon which they ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard

... meditated an immediate return to Norton; but as a rule she was absorbed in the interest and charm of the grey old city, which was so unlike anything she had yet visited. It was like turning back a page of history, to see with her own eyes those historical landmarks, of which she had read since childhood; to drive about looking at the names of the streets, the monuments at the corners, the great, inky buildings. Visitors from sunnier lands often take away from our capital an impression of gloom and ugliness, but Cornelia's artistic sense realised a picturesque element which rose superior ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... descended from the painted coach to the flower-enameled sward. The women amongst the assembled guests fluttered and whispered; for this was youth, beauty, wealth, London, and the Court, all drawn in the person of Mistress Evelyn Byrd, bred since childhood in the politest society of England, newly returned with her father to his estate of Westover in Virginia, and, from her garlanded gypsy hat to the point of her silken shoe, suggestive of the rainbow ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... not follow that a man will travel any further; but if he has really considered the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as far. This does not apply to formulae got by rote, which are stages on the road to nowhere but second childhood and the grave. To have a catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an oath ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... "I have been a priest from my childhood up, revering the Gods, and growing intimate with their mysteries. Till I find for myself that those old things are false, I must stand by that allegiance, and if there is a cost for this faithfulness I ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... Had the childhood of Mr. Lewis been passed under more favorable auspices; had his intellectual faculties been so cultivated as to predominate over his animal propensities, and his towering aspirations directed toward the accomplishment of acts, lofty in their benevolence, noble in their sacrifice, ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward

... next place, Jane was sure to take a large share of the fortune. To that Clem strongly objected, both on abstract grounds and because she regarded Jane with a savage hatred—a hatred which had its roots in the time of Jane's childhood, and which had grown in proportion as the girl reaped happiness from life. The necessity of cloaking this sentiment had not, you may be sure, tended to mitigate it. Joseph said that there was no longer ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing

... pages, who were now in the new King's service, were those who had been charged with the watch and ward of the craft and her cargaison. When the evening evened on them, the twain began talking and recounted that which had befallen them in their days of childhood and the manner of the faring forth of their father and mother from their country and kingdom when the wicked overcame their realm, and how they had gone astray in the forest and how Fate had severed them from their parents; for short, they told their tale from first ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... tell me what is the matter with the Princess von Eibenberg? What is the reason she is not happy? Look around in her house, Marianne Meier; you will behold there such opulence and magnificence as you never knew in the days of your childhood. Look at her gilt furniture, her carpets and lustres; look at the beautiful paintings on the walls, and at the splendid solid plate in her chests. Look at her velvet and silk dresses, adorned with ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... playing, in childhood, with the young ladies of the Buccleuch family, she had been overheard saying to her namesake Lady Anne Scott, "Well, I do wish I were Lady Anne too—it is so much prettier than Miss;" thenceforth she was commonly addressed in the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... Then, for some slight cause or for no cause at all, he retired within himself for a space when he remained dumb and glowered at the rest of the world morosely. Then he roused himself and emerged from his self-absorption into a frank crossness which wore away but slowly. A motherless childhood when he was alternately teased and spoiled by his older sisters and brother had helped on the trouble, and not even the wisdom of his father and the devotion of his stepmother could cure the complaint. At ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray

... editors and publishers, that his knowledge of Highland life would be questioned. All in London knew him as a Londoner. It would be useless for him to say that the Celtic Renaissance had brought back his childhood to him, a childhood as definitely dominated by a Highland nurse as Stevenson's was by the Lowland Alison Cunningham. It would be useless to tell of his summers in Argyllshire and among the inner isles, his intimacy with fishermen who were ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... not what the reason is: Where'er I dwell or roam, I make a pilgrimage each year, To my old childhood home. Have nothing there to give or get— No legacy, no gold— Yet by some home-attracting power I'm evermore controlled; This is the way the homesick do, I often ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas

... childhood he had directed, Messire Jacques begins by recalling what the Maid had wrought for him by God's help and her own great courage. He beseeches him to examine his conscience and see whether he has in any wise sinned against the grace ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... his brother? what white woman his sister? He had two courses left open to him: he could either have renounced all natural ties and have led a hopeless, joyless life amongst the whites, ever a servant, ever an inferior being; or he could renounce civilization and return to the friends of his childhood, and to the habits of his youth. He chose the latter course, and I think that I should ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... herself of a prosperous marriage, as well as any girl ever did understand its great significance. She was an orphan, living in fact on the charity of her uncle. And she was aware that having come to her uncle's house when all the weakness and attractions of her childhood were passed, she could have no hold on him or his such as would have been hers had she grown to be a woman beneath his roof. There was a thoughtfulness too about her,—a thoughtfulness which some, perhaps, may call worldliness,—which made it impossible for her not to have her own condition ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... the walls of my memory there still remains a picture of the great gray house where I spent my childhood. It was originally used for more than a hundred years as the convent of the "White Ladies", with its four long galleries, one above the other, looking proudly down upon the humbler dwellings of the village. On the side of the ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte

... was silent again. He had heard of poor Tom of the big heart from his mother, and there had been that in her soft speech of him which had made the great, tender creature very real. Even in his childhood his mother had been his passion, as he had been hers. Neither of them had had others to share their affection, and they were by nature creatures born to love. His first memory had been of looking up into the soft darkness of the ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... entitled to that name, must deal with what can be handled and scrutinized at leisure by the child, pulled apart, and even wasted. This can be done with the objects discussed in this book; they are under the feet of childhood—grass, feathers, a fallen leaf, a budding twig, or twisted shell; these things cannot be far out of the way, even within the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 17, March 4, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... and thereby of inviting insult. Parents whose children are known to be of the class pictured are themselves timid and indisposed to insist upon obedience from them, for fear of offending them and causing them to go away from home. The inexperience and ignorance of childhood and youth, coupled with the grant of too great liberty, are responsible for the too general tendency to ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... she lay on the knees of a fine lady from the town, and had a blanket on her back and a cloth about her head. Hush, Jenny; it is true that you had it! And I thought what a little rat it was. But do you know when that little creature was put down on the ground here some memories of her childhood or something must have wakened in her. She scratched, and kicked, and tried to rub off her blanket. And then she behaved like the big dogs here; so we said that Jenny must have grown up in ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof

... son to the youngest of four brothers who had recently contended together for the crown, and his ambition from childhood had been to rescue his country from foreign dominion, and consolidate the monarchy in his own person. He completed by foreign travel an education which, according to the Mahawanso, comprised every science and accomplishment of the age in which he lived, including theology, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... is the lily and all of the rest Of the flowers, to a man with a hart in his brest That was dipped brimmin' full of the honey and dew Of the sweet clover-blossoms his babyhood knew? I never set eyes on a clover-field now, Er fool round a stable, er climb in the mow, But my childhood comes back jest as clear and as plane As the smell of the clover I'm sniffin' again; And I wunder away in a bare-footed dream, Whare I tangle my toes in the blossoms that gleam With the dew ...
— Riley Farm-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley

... a hand at housework when needed, nourishing himself on the simple oatmeal and milk which throughout life remained his favourite food, submitting himself instinctively to the stern discipline of the home, he passed, happily on the whole, through his childhood and soon outstripped his comrades in the village school. His success there led to his going in his tenth year to the grammar school at Annan; and before he reached his fourteenth year he trudged off on foot to Edinburgh to begin his studies at ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore



Words linked to "Childhood" :   anal stage, early childhood, immaturity, phallic stage, second childhood, puerility, immatureness, maidhood, boyhood, time of life, latency stage, maidenhood, anal phase, phallic phase, girlhood, prepuberty, latency period, latency phase, child



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